Netflix Is Paying YouTubers for Videos That Are Already FreeNow YouTube Is Paying Them Not To

What Happened: Netflix Went Shopping, and YouTube Noticed

On July 9, 2026, Netflix announced a deal with Alex and Alan Stokes, the twins behind a channel with 141 million subscribers. Netflix got their most watched videos and an original series coming in 2027. The twins got paid. Their YouTube channel did not change at all.

Six weeks later, on August 19, Bloomberg reported that YouTube had started offering its biggest creators millions of dollars to keep their work off Netflix. Fortune and Tubefilter followed the same day. No deals had been signed yet. Several were said to be close.

Read those two stories together and you get the real one. This is not Netflix versus YouTube for viewers. It is Netflix and YouTube bidding against each other for the same few hundred creators. That is a very different market, and it is one creators have never been on the winning side of before.

The timeline above runs from January 2025 to August 2026. Ms. Rachel arrived on Netflix in January 2025. Mark Rober signed in August 2025. Alan Chikin Chow and Alix Earle signed in January 2026. Sidemen Inside season three premiered on Netflix in March 2026. In May, Netflix and Spotify bought the video rights to Jay Shetty's podcast. In June, Amazon opened a creator hub on Fire TV. In July, the Stokes Twins. In August, YouTube started paying to make it stop.

Why Netflix Is Shopping on YouTube in the First Place

Nielsen measures what Americans watch on their TV sets. In May 2026, YouTube took 13.8% of all US TV watch time. That was its best month ever, and the third month in a row it was the single biggest distributor. Netflix took 8% and sat in fourth place, behind Disney at 10% and NBCUniversal at 8.4%. Prime Video took 4.5%.

So the platform Netflix is licensing from is, on the television itself, bigger than Netflix. That is the whole reason for the shopping trip. Netflix cannot out spend its way to that kind of supply. It can rent it.

There is a second reason, and it is simpler. A Netflix original is a bet. A YouTube library is a result. When Netflix licenses the Stokes Twins, it already knows how many people watched, how long they stayed and which videos travelled. It is buying a show with the ratings printed on the box. We wrote about the same shift from the other direction in YouTube's New Hollywood and the rise of episodic creator series, and you can see it in Curry Barker's eight figure Universal deal, where a YouTube release became the pitch.

Everyone Netflix Has Signed So Far

This is the public list as of August 2026. Note the last column. In almost every case, the answer is yes.

Netflix has also picked up podcast properties including The Bill Simmons Podcast and The Breakfast Club, and reporting names Rhett and Link and Nick DiGiovanni among its creator partners. If you want a sense of how much money sits at this end of YouTube, our breakdown of the Forbes highest paid YouTubers list is the closest public benchmark, and YouTube's $60 billion in payouts shows the base these creators are already earning before a streamer calls.

What These Deals Actually Look Like

Here is the part most coverage skips. In the usual Netflix deal, the creator gives up almost nothing. The channel stays live. Ad revenue keeps coming. Sponsors stay. Merch keeps selling. The audience never has to choose. Netflix is not buying the show away from YouTube. It is buying the right to show it too.

That is a licence, not a transfer. It is closer to a very large brand sponsorship than to a TV contract. Somebody with money looked at your audience, decided it was worth paying for, and paid. The mechanics are the same at every size. Only the number changes.

Then there is the other shape. In May 2026, Bloomberg and Variety reported that Netflix and Spotify had bought exclusive video rights to Jay Shetty's podcast On Purpose in a deal worth up to $100 million. Neither company confirmed the figure. On July 13, new video episodes stopped going up on YouTube. Older episodes and promo clips stayed. Reporting says three other companies had bid in the nine figure range for the same show.

Sit with that. Four companies bid nine figures for the video rights to a podcast with about 5 million YouTube subscribers. Not for the host. Not for the format. For the audience that shows up.

It Is Working, and Netflix Published the Receipts

On July 16, 2026, Netflix published its engagement report for January to June. Members watched more than 97 billion hours, the highest half year Netflix has recorded. Buried in it are the creator titles.

Ms. Rachel took 69 million views across two seasons and became Netflix's most watched kids title. Mark Rober's CrunchLabs took 36 million views across four seasons. Salish and Jordan Matter took 29 million across two seasons. Danny Go! took 26 million in season one alone.

Remember that every one of those videos was, or still is, free on YouTube. Netflix paid for content its subscribers could have watched for nothing, and it became one of the best performing things on the service. That is not a bargain Netflix stumbled into. It is a verdict on where the good stuff is being made.

Amazon Is Running the Same Play, From a Different Angle

If this were only Netflix, you could call it a strategy. It is not. Amazon got there first with MrBeast. Beast Games season one put 1,000 contestants in front of a $5 million prize and reached 50 million viewers in its first 25 days. Season two ran from January 7 to February 25, 2026, with 200 contestants and a Survivor crossover. Prime Video has since renewed the show for two more seasons.

Then Amazon did something stranger. In June 2026, at Cannes Lions, it launched a creator hub on Fire TV with more than 120 channels. For creators including Dude Perfect, Jordan Matter and Ben Azelart, new videos appear on the Fire TV home screen the same day they go live on YouTube. Charlotte Maines, Amazon's VP of Devices Content and Advertising, framed it as a fix for discovery. Amazon said it was aiming for 200 creators by July 2026 and more than 500 by 2027.

Jordan Matter is on both. He is licensed to Netflix and carried on Amazon's Fire TV hub, while his YouTube channel keeps uploading. One creator, three distributors, no exclusivity. Ten years ago that sentence would have been a lawsuit. In 2026 it is just a good week. If you want the older version of this fight, our guide to YouTube MCNs and what they take shows how differently creators used to be treated by the middlemen.

Why YouTube Blinked

For 18 months YouTube could live with all of this. Non exclusive licences cost it nothing. The videos stayed. The ads ran. A creator getting a Netflix cheque was, if anything, a good advertisement for building on YouTube.

The Jay Shetty deal broke that. For the first time, a big show stopped posting new video episodes to YouTube because someone else paid more. That is not a licence any more. That is a channel changing address. And once one nine figure bid works, the next twenty get easier.

Look at the left column for a second. Direct financing. A share of platform brand deals. Cash up front. YouTube spent 20 years telling creators to build an audience and it would handle the money. Now it is offering the terms a studio offers, because a studio started offering them first. That is what competition for supply looks like, and creators are the supply. We track the wider version of this in YouTube's own creator partnership and brand deal programmes.

What This Means If You Are Not the Stokes Twins

Nobody reading this is about to get a Netflix call. That is fine, because the useful part of this story is not the size of the cheque. It is what got bought.

Netflix did not buy 141 million subscribers. Subscriber counts are cheap and half dead. It bought a library where people press play, stay to the end, and come back next week. Ms. Rachel did 69 million views on Netflix because her audience genuinely watches, not because she has a big number under her channel name.

That is the same evidence a sponsor asks for when your channel has 30,000 subscribers. Are these people paying attention? Do they act on what you say? Our nano influencer sponsorship rates page shows how small a channel can be and still get paid, and current YouTube sponsorship rates shows what those numbers turn into as you grow. The ladder is real. Netflix is just the top rung.

The other lesson is about leverage. Every one of these creators signed from a position of not needing to. They already had distribution, income and an audience nobody could take away. That is why the deals are non exclusive: the creator could walk. If you are building right now, that is the thing worth copying. Not the genre, not the format. The independence.

How to Tell If Your Audience Is the Kind That Gets Bought

You can check this yourself, and it has nothing to do with your subscriber count.

If you want the longer version of building that kind of channel, start with our YouTube growth strategy pillar and the MrBeast teardown, which is the clearest example of a creator who built leverage before anyone offered him a deal.

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